How are harder questions identified? By the number of answers? Upvotes of answers?
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Ladybug KillerJul 3 '09 at 14:33

(-1) Votes are consistent. They always mean the same thing. Once you start changing that, then they don't really mean anything anymore.
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devinbJul 3 '09 at 15:24

2

Furthermore, some people do incredibly STELLAR answers on something and get voted up thirty times, you would be penalizing those people, just because there are other people who get voted up for answers that aren't quite as good.
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devinbJul 3 '09 at 15:25

I've said this before - I'd like to see rep offered as a fixed potential amount per question with diminishing returns on votes such that early votes have more reward than later ones.
This has the effect of mitigating popularity and bandwagoning.

It's a little ridiculous to earn hundreds of rep on a single question, and less popular languages etc have a harder time attracting interest if you're not likely to get more than an upvote or two no matter how good your answer is.

Interesting idea... I'd like to see some data on the distribution of votes to high-ranked answers over time.

My gut feeling is that Ólafur is on the right track with the time-based approach. If multiple votes within a short time period (say, a day...) were considered less valuable than the same number of votes over a longer period, then truly great answers would still get rewarded. This could even be used to replace or inform the current daily rep cap...

Who decides the difficulty of a question? An easy question to some may be difficult to others.

Allows system to be gamed easily. If I solve a very easy question it would be possible for me to mark it as hard to get rep in my favor.

Edit

I can see some instances where this may be helpful, but there's too many cases where it wouldn't hold true.
A lot of the time partially correct or incomplete answers get voted up by one or two with the correct answer voted up much more. This is the expected behaviour.

Counter Proposal

Make upvote strength proportional to the upvotes on the question itself.

Reasoning

While usually answers to difficult questions have fewer votes, the questions themselves usually have more, and get set as a favorite much more frequently.

Using this method the community decides how useful the question was, and thus upvoted answers on quality questions are worth more.